


Look, He Gets a Name for It

by yourlibrarian



Series: Reviews [2]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Art, Gen, Inspired by Fanart, Inspired by Fanfiction, Meta, Museums
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 11:04:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6852115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While in NYC I went to its Folk Art Museum and saw an exhibit that instantly made me think of fanfic, especially since the exhibit itself was about works influenced by other works. The exhibit was about Henry Darger.  While I have no art history background and usually take for granted what curators tell me, in this case I feel I rather do get it and it's the curators who are kind of nuts.  And I think it's because I am accustomed these days to seeing things through lenses that fanfic has given me, and these are not lenses that these curators apparently share.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look, He Gets a Name for It

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted August 20, 2008

While in NYC I went to its Folk Art Museum and saw an exhibit that instantly made me think of fanfic, especially since the exhibit itself was about works influenced by other works. The exhibit [was about Henry Darger](http://folkartmuseum.org/search?s=darger). 

I need to say upfront that I have never taken an art history class, and I know very little about art despite having had several friends who are artists. So I have the feeling that part of this is going to come off like that cliché of someone looking at spatters of paint on a canvas and not getting it by saying "I could have done that."

The thing is though, I feel I rather do get it and it's the curators who are kind of nuts. And I think it's because I am accustomed these days to seeing things through lenses that fanfic has given me, and these are not lenses that these curators apparently share. But given the discussion surrounding this exhibit, I'm trying to hone in on what their definition of art is. There are some interviews with artists connected to the exhibit that reveal there are concerns among most artists about being connected to their influences for fear of being derivative and not "art." This puzzles me because I thought that part of what one studies in art history is different artistic movements and it would seem that such movements automatically classify certain artists as influencing one another and working in the same realms, yes? And if anything, it seems to me that the exhibit demonstrates how "influence" is a very broad thing, since I find the various artists involved fairly different from one another even as I see connections to Darger (some I'd argue, rather loose). Perhaps that's the point of the exhibit, but then maybe I'm not the target audience. After all, one only has to look at the vast panoply of fanfic which is a seething mass of influences to see how even work which is historically derivative is nonetheless original in various ways.

Returning to Darger though, I remain baffled by the suggestion in the exhibit notes that he is "one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century." This isn't even qualified by the word "folk." If she had said "prolific", this would have made more sense given the obsessive quantity of his art and writing. But I have to say I found it repetitive, and the art itself little more than copying material he found elsewhere. In fact, there was a part of the exhibit that showed samples of what items he traced to create his figures, and these were largely images of little blond girls from comics and ads. They were quite literally traced, so that they sometimes appeared in the finished piece without any sense of proportion to other figures. I couldn't help remembering how I'd done the same thing when I was 12 and used figures in comics or other drawings to help me create characters for stories I was writing. The thing is though, I copied them, I didn't trace them, and in revisiting the ones that I still have some were surprisingly accurate copies. My original drawings tended to be pretty poorly done, but I've still got some decent painted reproductions on my wall. And I kept wondering what was so remarkable about these drawings that he'd not only have his work saved, but shown and inspiring other artists. I never created long murals on tracing paper, but frankly it would have been less work than what I did do. As the curator notes he "freely and unapologetically commandeered images, and if all else failed he simply cut and pasted reproductions directly onto his watercolor paintings, creating collages." ("My mural iz pasted on, yay!")

Which brings me around to the point of the drawings, which was his story. If you think you've seen some epic fanfic around, well, apparently those writers really are just amateurs because as is stated repeatedly in various places in his bio, the drawings were illustrations of his 15,000 page story. One might guess at the quality of the content from the title alone ("The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion") as well as the definitely unbetaed writing structure seen in some of the mural captions. There's very little information on the content of this seemingly unending story, but he'd apparently been writing it since he was 19, so he was at it for about 60 years. Given the scenes and what little is said about the overall tale I think one could classify it as darkfic. 

And that's what made me wonder how many other people out there have thousands of pages of drawerfic in their homes, maybe also illustrated. These days, of course, there's no reason not to try for an audience online. Other than his obsessive nature (which manifested itself in other behaviors, such as a weather journal he kept for 9 years, a 5000 page autobiography, and a 10,000 page story that appears to be biographically inspired) I don't actually find what he did to be particularly remarkable.

But apparently some curators and artists do. Reading the discussion about him they seem to be impressed by his "unblinking work ethic." They don't mention what his day job was, or if he even had one, but since all of this was discovered only near the time of his death, it certainly wasn't from his writing and drawing. And I suppose there is something to be said for someone whose entertainment habits are so unwavering for such a long period of time. I mean the quantity alone seems remarkable, but it's mostly because he kept going for so long. If I were still writing and drawing since I was 12, I'd have about 9000 pages at this point too. But I didn't, and I find myself wondering what it is about Darger's life that failed to interrupt him along the way. (Finally, someone for whom the phrase "get a life" actually seems fitting). Is something "art" only because someone sacrifices everything else for its sake?

I notice, too, that Darger is hailed for being a "self-taught artist" not a writer. The museum includes discussion of the story because it lends some sense to the artwork, but they seem to gloss over the issue of its quality. And that reminded me of fan circles also, because so much of the discussion is about the nature of fan writing rather than fan artwork. Is that, I wonder, because artwork gets more of a pass in terms of "quality" concerns than writing? Is it simply because artwork doesn't have the same legal status? Why are the two things looked at so differently, especially since the two have developed hand-in-hand? If one looks at Darger's work, the writing is certainly more "original" than the art.

Lastly, I wondered if what was so "artistic" about Darger's work wasn't the method but the content. I was reminded of the discussions about the Id Vortex, coined by ellen_fremedon but better explored by [ursulav as she discusses](http://ursulav.livejournal.com/578058.html) _"as a kid. I'd wander around the backyard and just daydream for hours. Complicated stories and scenarios, largely inspired by whatever I was reading at the time. It was fantasy, as purely distilled as I imagine I will ever be capable of. I was maybe nine or ten. I actually wore a track in the grass from pacing and dreaming._

_This sounds all very sweet and idyllic and creative, but brother, I can remember just the edges of some of those daydreams, and holy shit on a cracker, that was some fucked-up stuff. It was what Teresa Nielsen Hayden once called "all the magic stuff: Sex, power issues, identity issues, physical or emotional violence, revelation, transformation, transcendence, violent catharsis, and whatever else is a high-tension power line for that writer."_

And I thought, yeah, that's what I recognized at once when I saw Darger's work. And as [Fremedon wrote](http://ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com/325780.html) you see fanfic writers tapping that, but it's rare for pro writers. _"Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they're shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone -- and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don't have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics."_ Or, you know, a beta who says "End this story already! And have it make sense!"

Which leads me to my final point, which is that of audience. It seems pretty clear that what Darger did was exactly the sort of solitary writing mentioned above. He died in 1973 so there was no wave of mass sharing over the Internet yet. But I wondered if what these artists valued about his work was also his solitude, his total isolation in this work. It's another cliché that great artists are often the most successful after their deaths. I don't know if this says more about the way the art world works and the simple value of scarcity, or if it suggests that artistic isolation is itself a component of artistic validity. If so, that would seem an ironic idea in an exhibit about artistic influence. 

But perhaps there has to be a certain isolation for that Id Vortex to come into full play in the way it did for Darger. With so few people in that circumstance (I would hope), maybe this seems startlingly original to sectors of the art world. But to me, it seems more like work I see every day only gone awry -- unusable and unreadable due to that very lack of audience that would make something from one mind capable of transferring itself successfully to many. Which leads me to the final quote of one of the exhibit's artists, Robyn O'Neil: _"Great art should baffle, but how often does that truly happen? When images bewilder and quiet, they resonate forever."_ In that sense then, I guess Darger's work is great art. But at least from the fanfic standpoint I don't see Darger's work as some kind of artistic success, but an artistic failure.


End file.
